In the weeks before I started high school, amongst all my other fears about bullies and changing classrooms and having a locker, the fact that I’d be a few hundred metres from the graveyard began to get to me. I started having nightmares that I was sitting in a classroom all on my own, waiting for a teacher or classmates to join me. But no one was around. Everything was quiet. And then I’d feel it, this sensation that something was outside in the hall. Something evil. As soon as I sensed it, I became paralysed — none of my muscles would work, not my legs, or hands, or my vocal cords. There was nothing I could do. I knew the spirit was coming for me — the door would fly open — and I’d wake up screaming.
The dream was so real that when I opened my eyes, I was still convinced the evil was in the room with me. I didn’t have the courage to turn on my own bedside light.
Mum and Dad would both come running, but neither of them knew what to do. Dad tried giving me herbal teas called ‘tranquil night’ and ‘sleep easy’. Mum sprayed lavender on my pillowcases and ruled out certain foods after 8 pm.
When the dreams happened multiple times a week, I often found them whispering to each other when I came down to breakfast. I had good enough hearing to know that Dad was suggesting a therapist — ‘Maybe it’s a good idea anyway, what with the bullying’ — whereas Mum suggested some witch doctor should come and ‘clear the house of any residual energy. I know you’re laughing at me, Daniel, but in Colombia things are different.’
That freaked me out even more. Was that thing I felt in my room real? Like some kind of warning?
After one particularly bad night, Mum told me to get dressed and get in the car. When we headed towards Jefferson High, I wondered if we were going to the doctor for a referral to a therapist. We were obviously about to go past the cemetery. I took the biggest breath I could.
Suddenly Mum pulled to the side of the road — right outside the cemetery. I wanted to yell, ‘Mum, what are you doing?’ but didn’t dare open my mouth. I prayed she’d pulled over to make a phone call, or get something out of her bag — something quick, and then we’d be on our way again. My chest was burning like when Emily and I tried to make it to the other end of the swimming pool on one breath. I had about a minute before I’d be forced to inhale.
I realised Mum had taken the keys out of the ignition and was putting them in her handbag, which was at my feet.
She straightened up and looked at me. ‘Sweetie, this has to stop. There’s no need for you to feel scared like this.’
I shook my head. She was obviously trying some immersion therapy and it was not helping. I could feel my pulse thumping through me, like the stereo was on and the bass was throbbing through my seat.
Mum sighed. ‘Okay, there’s only one solution then. Get out of the car.’
What? My pulse became more frenetic. I looked at Mum, hoping she was joking.
She opened her door. ‘Now, Adriana.’ Her tone was ‘do as I say’, which for Mum was rare.
I let go of the breath I’d been holding.
As I sucked in another one, Mum opened my door before I could hit the lock button. ‘Out!’
She looped her arm through mine and nodded her head towards the cemetery gates. Part of me wanted to run away, or sink down on the pavement and have a tantrum, kicking and screaming for Mum to take me home. But both of those options involved inhaling and my whole body was geared against that.
‘Let me tell you a story.’ Mum patted my arm as she started walking. ‘When I was a little girl, I lived in Mexico.’
I looked at her in shock.
‘I know. I’ve only told you about Colombia,’ she said. ‘I get sad talking about Mexico as it reminds me of my papa. He was from Mexico, and my mother was from Colombia. When my mother was pregnant with me, they moved to Mexico so he could work with his brothers, and his mother and sisters could help her with me, the baby.’
We reached the gates to the cemetery. At that point, I burst into tears. Night after night of dreams had hammered the fear into me so deep that going through those gates felt like signing my death certificate. Rows of headstones blurred into a shimmering mass of grey through my wet eyes. And suddenly my not-breathing had turned into breathing too fast. Air was going in and out of my lungs, but it was like I couldn’t absorb it.
Mum held me against her. ‘Breathe with me. In, one, two, three. Out, one, two, three. Nothing can hurt you, I promise. Your mum is tough, you know. No ghost would be a match for me!’
An image of Mum stabbing at a ghost with her car keys and shrieking in her Colombian accent popped into my mind, and a giggle slipped out.
‘There!’ She pulled away from our hug and kissed me on the forehead. ‘Now, let’s go inside, sit down on that bench and I’ll finish the story.’
Mum opened the cemetery gates, which, unlike the movies, didn’t creak. She led me over to a bench that was half-shaded by a fig tree whose branches let through snippets of summer sun. As we sat down and Mum put her arm around me, the patches of sunlight warmed my legs. If my immediate view wasn’t of graves, it would have felt like we were at the park.
‘If you think I’m acting crazy forcing you into a graveyard in daytime, imagine coming here at night!’ Mum said.
I shivered, even though the sun was warm through my jeans. ‘Who comes to a graveyard at night?’
Mum laughed. ‘Mexicans! In Mexico, there’s a festival that happens every year for three days. It’s called Dia de los Muertos, which means Day of the Dead.’
I looked at her in horror.
‘I’m serious,’ she said. ‘Mexicans — and many other cultures in South America — believe that the world of the living and the world of the dead coexist at all times, and Dia de los Muertos is a way of showing the spirits of the dead that you still care about them. So on the Day of the Dead, your father’s family would visit the local graveyard, and clean the graves and decorate them with bunches of flowers called cempasúchil, which is a type of marigold, usually yellow or orange. We would take the dead person’s favourite food and drinks and put these on the grave too, along with photos and gifts. All the family would gather together and picnic and play cards in the graveyard, telling funny stories about their relatives who had passed away. We would poke fun at them —’
‘Poke fun? Weren’t you worried about making them angry?’
Mum’s voice was so bright while she was telling me about the festival, but the whole thing seemed weird. Picnicking in a graveyard? It sounded like the Addams Family or something.
‘You need to stop thinking of spirits as angry, Adriana.’ Mum squeezed my shoulder. ‘Anyway, my aunties and uncles would try to one up each other to tell the funniest story — we were always laughing. There were serious moments too, of course, which is part of accepting that the person you loved is gone, but so much of the festival was uplifting. There were bands playing music in the cemeteries, and we made special bread with bones on it called pan de muerto, and skulls made out of sugar cane called calaveras. For weeks before the festival you would smell the bread and sugar cooking. I’ll show you what they look like.’
She pulled out her phone and typed ‘sugar calaveras’ and images of white skulls piled on top of each other, the faces painted in bright colours, filled the screen. They looked so festive, but the idea of eating one, its gaping eyes looking straight at you, made me feel disturbed.
‘You put them on altars with incense and flowers to honour the spirits, but they’re also given to children to help them see death as a part of life.’
‘Do you feel like that? Are you not scared of death because you celebrated the festival when you were little?’
Mum’s face was thoughtful. ‘I saw a lot of awful things in Colombia. Lots of poverty, and violence, people going hungry and suffering from terrible illnesses. Sometimes I think there are worse things than dying. I’m scared of not being with your dad and you, of course.’
‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ I said.
Sitting there in
the cemetery was drumming into me that someday I wouldn’t be alive. Mum wouldn’t be either, nor Dad. I couldn’t deal with what that meant. It was one thing to think about death, but it was a whole other thing to believe it and try to accept it was going to happen.
‘But I’m not scared of spirits, or graveyards,’ Mum said firmly. ‘One of my best memories of my papa is in a graveyard. My mama would never let me stay for the overnight vigils — she was a very strict Catholic and the big Dia de los Muertos ceremonies always seemed wrong to her. She always took me home with her before sunset. I would beg and beg every year to be able to stay at the festival all night. Finally, the year I was ten, she let me stay overnight with the family.’
Mum had desperately wanted to camp overnight in a graveyard? Sometimes I forgot how different her childhood was to mine. If someone made me go to a cemetery at night, I wouldn’t be able to hold it together. I might be sitting here now and coping — which still seemed unbelievable to me — but if the sun disappeared …
‘Weren’t you scared?’ I asked.
Mum shook her head emphatically. ‘No! Adriana, it was so beautiful. There were hundreds of candles, and their light illuminated the cempasúchil so the whole graveyard was lit up with this orange glow. Papa led me round all of the different graves and told me so much about his family and their history. A few months later we went back to Colombia because my mama’s mama got so sick, and Papa worked hard to look after us all. So hard that he died of a heart attack when I was sixteen.’ Mum’s voice trembled for a moment. ‘That overnight vigil was the first and last we celebrated together, and I was grateful that he’d told me all those stories. Sometimes we don’t ask the questions we should while people are alive.’
I thought then of how I hadn’t known Mum had lived in Mexico for more than ten years.
Mum stood up. ‘So for me, graveyards are about history and family. I don’t want you to be scared of them.’
We ended up walking from grave to grave together, hand in hand, reading the stones’ inscriptions to each other. Mum told me more of her memories from Mexico. I was used to her throwing in a story about Colombia now and again, but I’d never asked as many questions as I did that day. Being there with her, feeling her hand squeeze mine, made the graveyard seem far from threatening, and I started to relax. I’ve never been scared of graveyards since.
Cemeteries aren’t the scary thing. The real horror is the gaping hole you face every day, knowing that person isn’t here any more.
When we buried Mum in that same graveyard, only about a year and a half after our walk there, when they lowered the coffin down, and my breathing became all-out hyperventilation, and I couldn’t bear to look at any of the faces around me, especially not Dad’s, what came into my head was: She’ll be right here, across the road. I can visit her any time I want.
I couldn’t cope with the idea that Mum was a hundred per cent gone. It was unbearable. It made me want to die myself, just so the pain would ease.
Instead, I chose to think of Dia de los Muertos, and how her world was edging mine, and how I could show her that she was remembered and celebrated, not just for three days a year, but every day.
I visited her daily, sometimes before school, sometimes after. Sometimes I’d bring a copy of a test I got an A on. Other times I’d bring the chocolate éclairs she’d been obsessed with, from a patisserie in the city. Often, I’d bring a yellow or an orange flower.
When I had particularly bad days, I’d spend my whole lunchtime there, sitting on the grass. It felt like the closest equivalent to my debriefing Mum after school, only I’d have to imagine her replies. Sometimes they were encouraging. Other times they gave me a different perspective, a way of looking at the situation that made me see things in a new light.
At the start, Emily came with me, but she had a habit of filling the quiet with conversation, especially when she felt uneasy, and the graveyard definitely made her uneasy. She wasn’t scared of it, but she always looked relieved when we headed back to school.
I didn’t want to talk while we were there. I couldn’t imagine Mum’s voice when someone else’s was filling the air. So after a while I told Emily that I needed to go alone.
Of course, sitting alone in a cemetery gave Tatiana more fuel for her ‘Adriana’s a weirdo’ fire. I became ‘Graveyard Girl’ to all my classmates. The main rumour was that I sat there murmuring spells to bring the dead back to life. Someone left a dead rat in my locker with a note: Thought you might need something to sacrifice. Another time it was: Don’t you know that Goth is SO out of date?
A group of boys in our art class were caught snickering over a cartoon they’d created that depicted me with ghoul-like eyes wearing nineteenth-century mourning clothes, a black bonnet on my head. Emily retaliated with a huge canvas depicting the boys as half-pigs, and the class died laughing before the boys ripped it up.
I remember sitting in the office with Call Me Sam, Ms Collins, Emily and the boys, with everyone wanting me to give my side of the story, but I couldn’t summon the energy to say anything. It was tiring and stupid and there were too many other things that seemed worse by comparison. It was odd. I cared when my classmates made fun of my looks or my stammering answers in class, but I didn’t care what they said about me going to the graveyard.
Part of the reason I gave up confiding in Call Me Sam was that he told me I shouldn’t be leaving the grounds during school hours and, in his opinion, my behaviour wasn’t helping me ‘fit in’. I had never fitted in and I never would, especially now Mum had gone. Because grief makes you feel like an alien.
You don’t catch the jokes going on around you. Conversations are indistinguishable hums. I’d always been slow with my replies. Before Mum’s death, it was my hesitation that caused people to give me ‘answer me already’ looks, but afterwards I didn’t even register the question.
I was better off talking to a headstone, because at least no one was judging me, thinking She’s a wreck, or She’s coping a little too well. At least in the graveyard, I was away from all that. I was with her.
It seems stupid, right? To think that sitting by a piece of stone, something completely at odds with the softness of human skin, can make you feel like the person buried at the foot of it might be able to hear your stories.
Now, after a year and a half of being away, I’m back again, terrified that I might find soft-drink cans or chocolate wrappers littering her spot. Instead, I feel my heart squeeze like mad because someone has put fresh flowers on her grave — recently by the look of the petals. They tremble ever so slightly, like the grass is breathing.
I hear laughter near the fence — there’s a group of girls leaning against the wooden pickets, fixing up their lipstick while they look in hand-held mirrors. Normal high-school girls. Not like graveyard-lurking Adriana. I’m sure when I walk by them they’ll make faces behind my back.
I remember what Dylan said to me once. ‘Addy, if it doesn’t hurt anyone, and it makes you feel better, then who the hell cares?’
Emily’s Diary
Back when I was about four, when Mum was first teaching me about art — and by teaching I don’t mean some serious sermon; instead, she chatted to me while she worked on a piece and I lay on the big crimson rug that covered the floorboards in her studio — she told me about complementary colours.
She’d already shown me how combining certain colours could create a whole new one, mixing blue and yellow on her palette to show me how green appeared, and helping me blend blue and red to make my favourite colour of all, purple. After that lesson, Mum gave me paper and my own mini palette and I played mix and match with all the shades. Making a brand new colour from completely different ones seemed like magic.
I’d expected to be able to make a new colour every time I combined two, but a lot of the combinations turned into blah colours, like muddy green or grunge grey. I asked Mum what I was doing wrong. She stopped work at her canvas and sat down next to me.
‘So red, yellow an
d blue are primary colours, which means that we can combine them to make different colours like purple, orange and green, which are known as secondary colours. You can play with secondary colours a little bit to get different shades. If we take your paintbrush and mix orange with one of the primary colours it’s made from, say your red paint …’
Mum mixed the colours on my palette and I watched the orange change to a different shade.
‘See how it changes a bit?’ she said. ‘It becomes a more reddy-orange. Let me grab my colour wheel for you.’
She brought back a wheel that looked like a big pizza, except the pieces were all different colours.
‘You see how the colours that relate to each other are close to each other?’ she said. ‘Like the red and the red-orange are next to each other, and very close to the pure orange and the yellow-orange? If I’m working on a painting, I remember that these colours are related and I know they’ll work well together.’
‘Like the desert, right?’ I pointed to one of Mum’s paintings on the wall. It always looked like the colours of a fire to me. Sometimes in winter I’d go and put my hand against it, because I feel like it should be burning hot.
‘Exactly, Emily!’ Mum looked surprised. ‘You totally understand.’ She got up from the rug and walked over to the painting. ‘You see, I used lots of different oranges and yellows and reds, as many as I could combine.’
‘But you put blue in there too.’ I pointed up at the corners of the painting.
‘Yup. Some colours, even though they aren’t close to each other on the colour wheel, still work when you put them next to each other.’ She came back to the rug and picked up the colour wheel again. ‘You see how blue and orange are opposite each other? And yellow and purple? They’re what we call complementary colours. If you put them next to each other, they contrast, which means they look very different, and also make each other look brighter. See how the purple looks stronger next to the yellow than it does next to the blue?’
My Best Friend Is a Goddess Page 9
